And I am her murderer!—I am her murderer!—Despair is left me—only despair!—I may not cry here. I must get away—away! [Moritz Stiefel, with his head under his arm, comes stumping over the graves.]

Moritz—One moment, Melchior. It may be long before the chance recurs. You’ve no idea how everything depends on the time and place....

Melchior—Where did you come from?

Moritz—From over there—from the wall. You knocked down my cross. I lie by the wall.—Give me your hand, Melchior....

Melchior—You are not Moritz Stiefel!

Moritz—Give me your hand. I’m certain sure you’ll thank me. It’ll never be so easy for you again. This is a rarely fortunate meeting.—I came up especially⁠——

Melchior—Don’t you sleep?

Moritz—Not what you call sleeping.—We sit on church steeples, on lofty gables,—wherever we want....

Melchior—Ever restless?

Moritz—For fun.—We scoot around young birch-trees, round lonely forest shrines. Over gatherings of people we hover, over sites of misfortune, over gardens and festival places. In the dwelling-houses we crouch in the chimney-corner and behind the bed-curtains.—Give me your hand!—We have little to do with each other but we see and hear everything that happens in the world. We know that everything is folly that men strive for and achieve,—and laugh at it.

Melchior—What good does that do?

Moritz—What’s it need to do?—We are out of reach—nor good nor evil can touch us any more. We stand high, high above the earth-folk, each for himself alone. We have nothing to do with each other because that bores us. None of us still has anything at heart whose loss he could feel. We are equally immeasurably far above both grief and rejoicing. We are content with ourselves, and that is all!—The living we despise beyond words: we can hardly pity them. They amuse us with their doings, because, being alive, they are not really to be pitied. We smile, each to himself, over their tragedies, and meditate.—Give me your hand! If you will give me your hand, you will fall over with laughing at the emotion with which you give me your hand....

Melchior—Doesn’t that disgust you?

Moritz—We stand too high above it for that. We smile!—At my funeral I was among the mourners. I got a lot of entertainment from it. That is sublimity, Melchior! I made more noise than any of them, and slipped off to the wall to hold my sides for laughter. Our unapproachable sublimity is in fact the only standpoint that lets us assimilate the dirt.... I suppose I was laughed at too before I soared aloft!

Melchior—I have no desire to laugh at myself.

Moritz— ... The living as such are truly not to be pitied.—I admit I should never have thought so either. And now it’s beyond my comprehension how one can be so naïve. Now I see thru the fraud so clearly that not the tiniest cloud is left.—How can you hesitate, Melchior? Give me your hand. In a turn of the head you’ll be standing sky-high above yourself.—Your living is a grievous omission, a sin of negligence....

Melchior—Can you dead forget?

Moritz—We can do everything. Give me your hand! We can be sorry for the young, for the way they take their timidity for idealism, and the old, whose stoical superiority comes near to breaking their hearts. We see the Kaiser shake for dread of a street-song, and the beggar for dread of the trump of doom. We look straight thru the actor’s make-up, and see the poet in the dark don his. We behold the contented man in his beggary, and in the weariness of his burdened soul the capitalist. We observe people in love, and see them blush before each other in the presentiment that they are frauds defrauded. Parents we see bringing children into the world in order that they may call to them “How fortunate you are to have such parents!”—and we see the children go forth and do the like. We can eavesdrop on the innocent in their lonely cravings, and the five-groschen drab at her reading of Schiller.... God and the devil we see making fools of themselves before each other, and cherish in our hearts the unshakable conviction that both are drunk.... A quiet—a content—Melchior!—You need only reach me your little finger.—You may get to be snow-white before such a favorable moment appears to you again.

Melchior—If I shake hands on it, Moritz, it will be from self-contempt. I see myself proscribed. What lent me courage, lies in the grave. I can no longer think myself worthy of noble impulses—and perceive nothing, nothing, that might yet stand in the way of my descent.—I am, in my own opinion, the most detestable creature in the universe....

Moritz—What are you waiting for? [A Muffled Gentleman enters, and addresses Melchior.]

The Muffled Gentleman—The fact is, you’re shivering with hunger. You’re in no sort of condition to decide.—[To Moritz.] Go.

Melchior—Who are you?

The Muffled Gentleman—That will come out.—[To Moritz.] Vanish!—What have you here to do?—Why haven’t you got your head on?

Moritz—I shot myself.

The Muffled Gentleman—Then stay where you belong! You’re altogether done with. Don’t bother us here with your charnel stench. Inconceivable—why, just look at your fingers! Pah, what the devil! they’re crumbling down already!

Moritz—Don’t send me away, please!...

Melchior—Who are you, good sir?

Moritz—Don’t send me away, I beg you! Let me take part in things here a little while yet. I will not oppose you in anything.—It’s so chilly down there!

The Muffled Gentleman—Then why do you brag about sublimity?—You know well enough that that’s humbug—sour grapes! Why do you wilfully lie, you coinage of the brain?—If you value the favor so highly, stay for all of me; but look out for any more hot-air boasting, my friend, and kindly keep your rotting hand out of the game!

Melchior—Are you going to tell me who you are, or not?

The Muffled Gentleman—No.—I propose that you entrust yourself to me. First, I should see to your getting away.

Melchior—You are—my father?!

The Muffled Gentleman—Would you not recognize your worthy father by his voice?

Melchior—No.

The Muffled Gentleman—The gentleman, your father, is seeking comfort at this moment in the capable arms of your mother.—I open the world to you. Your momentary want of balance springs from your wretched situation. With a hot supper in your belly, you can laugh at it.

Melchior—[To himself.] They can’t both be the devil!—[Aloud.] After what I have been guilty of, no hot supper can give my peace of mind back to me!

The Muffled Gentleman—That depends on the supper!—So much I can tell you: that the little girl would have borne her child first rate! She was perfectly built. She simply succumbed to Mother Schmidtin’s abortives.—I will take you among men. I will give you an opportunity to expand your horizon beyond your wildest dreams. I will make you acquainted with everything interesting, without exception, that the world has to offer.

Melchior—Who are you? Who are you?—I can’t consign myself to a person I don’t know!

The Muffled Gentleman—You’ll never learn to know me unless you entrust yourself to me.

Melchior—Do you think so?

The Muffled Gentleman—Fact!—And anyway you have no choice.

Melchior—I can at any moment give my friend here my hand.

The Muffled Gentleman—Your friend is a charlatan. Nobody smiles, who has one penny left in his pocket. The sublimated humorist is the wretchedest, most pitiable creature in creation!

Melchior—Let the humorist be what he will. Tell me who you are, or I’ll give the humorist my hand!

The Muffled Gentleman—Well?!

Moritz—He is right, Melchior. I have been putting on airs. Let him treat you, and make full use of him. No matter how muffled he may be, he is, at least, that!

Melchior—Do you believe in God?

The Muffled Gentleman—That depends.

Melchior—Do you want to tell me who discovered gunpowder?

The Muffled Gentleman—Berthold Schwarz—alias Constantine Anklitzen—round 1330, a Franciscan monk at Freiburg-im-Breisgau.

Moritz—What would I give to have had him let it alone!

The Muffled Gentleman—You would merely have hanged yourself!

Melchior—What do you think about morality?

The Muffled Gentleman—Look here!—am I your schoolboy?

Melchior—Ask me what you are!

Moritz—Don’t quarrel!—Please don’t quarrel! What good will come of that?—What are we sitting, one dead and two live men, here together in the churchyard at two in the morning for, if we want to fall out like tipplers!—It was for my pleasure that I was allowed to remain and witness the proceedings. If you want to quarrel, I’ll take my head under my arm and go.

Melchior—You’re still the same old runaway!

The Muffled Gentleman—The ghost isn’t so wrong. One shouldn’t ignore one’s dignity.—By morality I understand the real product of two imaginary quantities. The imaginary quantities are should and would.⁠[7] The product is called morality, and its reality is unquestionable.

Moritz—Oh, if you had only told me that sooner! My morality harried me to death. For my dear parents’ sake I clutched at deadly weapons. “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land.” In my case the text has phenomenally stultified itself!

The Muffled Gentleman—Indulge in no illusions, my dear friend. Your precious parents would no more have died of it than you. Strictly speaking, they would in fact have stormed and blustered merely from the necessities of health.

Melchior—You may be right so far:—but I can tell you positively, good sir, that if I had given Moritz my hand just now without more ado, the blame would have rested simply and solely on my morality.

The Muffled Gentleman—But that’s just the reason you’re not Moritz!

Moritz—All the same I don’t believe the difference is so material—at least, not so conclusive, that you might not perchance have met me too, esteemed Unknown, as I trotted that time through the alder-thickets with the pistol in my pocket.

The Muffled Gentleman—And don’t you remember me? Why, even at the final moment, you still were standing between Death and Life.—But here, in my opinion, is not exactly the place to prolong so deeply probing a debate.

Moritz—It is indeed growing cold, gentlemen!—Though they did dress me in my Sunday suit, I have on under it neither shirt nor drawers.

Melchior—Good-bye, dear Moritz. Where this person is taking me, I don’t know; but he is somebody⁠——

Moritz—Don’t lay it up against me, Melchior, that I tried to make away with you! It was old attachment.—I’d be willing to have to wail and weep all my life if I could now accompany you out of here once more!

The Muffled Gentleman—In the end, each has his share—you the consoling consciousness of having nothing—thou the enervating doubt of everything.—[To Moritz.] Farewell.

Melchior—Farewell, Moritz! Accept my cordial thanks for appearing to me once more. How many glad, untroubled days have we not spent with one another in these fourteen years! I promise you, Moritz, let chance what will,—tho in the years to come I turn ten times a different man,—be my path upwards or downwards,—you I shall never forget⁠——

Moritz—Thanks, thanks, dear friend.

Melchior—And when some day I am an old man, grizzle-haired, then perhaps it will be you that once again stand closer to me than all those living with me.

Moritz—I thank you.—Luck to your journey, gentlemen.—Lose no more time!

The Muffled Gentleman—Come, child! [He links arms with Melchior, and makes off with him over the graves.]

Moritz—Here I sit now with my head in my arm.—The moon hides her face, unveils again, and looks not a hair the wiser.—So now I’ll turn back to my little plot, straighten the cross up that the madcap kicked so recklessly down on me, and when all is in order I’ll lay myself out on my back again, warm myself with decay, and smile....

CURTAIN